Word: mandelbaum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Well thank you for letting us know. Actually most of what happened since 1945 is given short shrift in this book as Mandelbaum focuses on the strategic role played by Kennedy and McNamara in the nuclear debate. But though Mandelbaum manages to give a fairly competent review of the bare bones of the strategic disputes of the Kennedy administration, he persists in understanding policy development as the province of a very few, very talented men. Thank heaven for the best and the brightest...
ULTIMATELY, Mandelbaum simply believes in different myths than most of the rest of us. He still believes, it seems from this book, that policy development is a coherent, discrete process; that America of the 40s and 50s was a disinterested defender of democracy and world peace; that America as a whole could be considered as a whole; that consensus still reigned in American politics in the crucial years of the nuclear debate...
This book, however, is more than just a reflection of that myth; it is an attempt to shore up its sagging walls. So Mandelbaum revives in over 200 pages a picture of American government that no longer plays even in Peoria. The Vietnam War happened for the rest of us, if not for Mandelbaum, and some of the basic ideas handed to generations of Gov. 40 veterans no longer ring true...
...would be nice if they did, for our own self image if for nothing else. But after Vietnam it is hard to argue that America's foreign policy or military strategy were ever the untainted products of American liberal values. It is a testament to Mandelbaum's naivete that it is only eight pages short of the end of the book that he realizes that while "Americans regarded their own intentions as self-evidently peaceful...the Soviets may not have shared this view...
...Mandelbaum's work would just be trivial if directed solely at an academic audience. We could then leave it for the far more brutal reviewers of the professional journals. But at least in part, he has aimed it at a general readership. And to the degree that Mandelbaum's picture is false--to the degree that he recycles the myths that justified U.S. governmental expertise--this book is an extraordinarily scurrilous document...